The Arms & Equipment Guide is a 96-page illustrated book that describes hundreds of items for heroes to purchase, ranging from the mundane to the marvelous. In these pages you'll find excerpts from catalogs and reports that list what's available. Of course, heroes have to know where to find what they want - and must have the cash to afford it, or the savvy to bargain for a better price
A best-selling author and award-winning game designer, Richard Baker is known for his novels in the Forgotten Realms setting and his work on the Dungeons & Dragons game. His Realms novels include Condemnation (book 3 of the War of the Spider Queen), the Last Mythal trilogy, and the Blades of the Moonsea trilogy. He is currently working on a new military-themed science fiction series centered on the character Sikander North; Valiant Dust, the first book in the new series, debuts in November 2017 from Tor Books.
A native of Ocean City, New Jersey, Rich graduated from Virginia Tech in 1988 and went on to serve as a surface warfare officer in the United States Navy. When he's not writing fantasy or science fiction, he works in game publishing. He's the founder of Sasquatch Game Studio, a small game company based in Auburn, Washington.
Rich currently resides in the Seattle area with his wife, Kim, and their daughters Alex and Hannah. His interests include gaming (naturally), history, hiking, racquetball, and the Philadelphia Phillies.
Alternity was the first generic Scifi RPG we discovered or the first Scifi in general if you consider Star Wars to be SciFantasy as I do. While by today's standards the character creation was labored and time consuming, some character creation options and stats were unbalanced, and systems sometimes a bit clunky, at the time it was cutting edge.
While now it's outdated and a few attempts to try it out again fizzled, I still haven't seen anything that seems to replace it for IP-free generic Scifi systems. Perhaps I haven't looked hard enough, but in my mind Alternity sits on its moldering throne, now rendered useless and doddering by age but with no clear successor to replace it.